“Ava, you don’t know what you’re doing!” she said. “I know I can’t let you destroy the Darklings,” I said. “They’re not our enemies—the tenebrae are.” As I said the word I felt a prickling at the nape of my neck. The Dianas, entranced as they were, took a step backward. Dame Beckwith looked suddenly terrified.
“It’s the Darkling feather,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “It’s summoned them.”
Them? I turned slowly, still holding the blazing feather in front of me. Its glare blinded me at first. The line of trees loomed black against the purple sky, their shadows distorted by the light of the blazing feather and the torches behind me. But then I realized that the shadows were not distorted. They were alive.
They were taller than the tallest tree in the forest and bristled like pines, but unlike the trees they could move. They lumbered out of the forest now, each step shaking the ground beneath my feet.
How could shadows shake the ground?
Because these are shadows made of flesh, a voice inside my head answered. It was a familiar voice. I had heard it before, after the crow attack when I had fallen into the dark well, on the streets of Rhinebeck when its owner had held me captive, and in the dungeon when the tenebrae had swarmed around me. The voice belonged to Judicus van Drood, the Shadow Master. Only the creature in front of me wasn’t a man.I It was an amalgam of oozing shadow that was capped by a belled shape—like a short cape topping a long coat. It was the man in the Inverness cape made huge. I lifted the blazing feather higher in a shaking hand to unmask his face . . . only there was no face, only shadows roiling in the dark. This creature was a projection of the Shadow Master’s mind.
I wouldn’t underestimate that, Ava dearling, the voice said inside my head. How had it gotten there?
You let me in.
I could feel the voice, like a snake slithering through my brain, nosing at my thoughts, memories, feelings . . .
“No!” I screamed aloud.
Yessss, it hissed, the shadows writhing with the pulse of his voice. You watched the shadows tell my story. I felt you watching. It felt so good to have someone see how she led me on and then turned her back on me.
“That’s not what I saw,” I cried, but I could feel him inside my brain, prying at the memory of what I had seen inside the candelabellum room, releasing the images from the recesses of my brain as a beater flushes game from the brush. The shadow pictures flew upward and then began to spin inside my brain as though my head was the candelabellum chamber. I saw my mother as a young woman at Blythewood, running up the steps, laughing with her friends, ringing the bells, her face rosy with the exercise—yes, I could see the peaches-and-cream color of her skin, the bright red of her hair, the flash of her green eyes. The shadow pictures had taken on hue and flesh in my head as I watched them. I was hungry for them, for memories of my mother before she had grown thin and wasted, haunted . . .
Haunted by what she had done to me.
I saw her with a young man, a familiar-looking young man, sitting together in the library, their heads bent low over a book. She was reading aloud, something in Latin, and he was nodding along to the rhythm of the poem, holding up a finger now and then to correct her.
“You were her teacher.”
Yes, but hardly older than her. I’d just finished my training at Hawthorn.
Images of a young man fencing and running through a rugged landscape flashed through my brain and I recalled Nathan’s disparaging comments about Hawthorn’s rigorous regimen.
Yes, it’s quite brutal. By the time I arrived at Blythewood imagine how grateful I was for feminine companionship—and how susceptible! Evangeline was everything I could want in a wife and helpmate, but I was circumspect. I followed the protocol as established by the Order, inquiring with the proper authorities into the suitability of a match.
I saw the young van Drood speaking to a young—and quite beautiful—Dame Beckwith, the two of them consulting the ledgers. She, I realized now, was the other woman I’d been shown by the candelabellum, the one who had tried to draw van Drood away from the shadows—but had failed.
“But that’s awful!” I objected. “Arranging a marriage as though mating animals!”
Yes, I couldn’t agree with you more, dear Ava. If I had spoken of my feelings directly to Evangeline . . . if I had spoken sooner, things might have been quite different. But by the time the Order approved the match, your mother had fallen in love with someone else.
I saw van Drood and my mother standing in the garden, beneath a rose arbor, silhouetted against a sunset sky like two figures in an engraving. He held a small jewel box in his hand and she was shaking her head. He reached for her. She withdrew. They looked like the automaton figures on the repeater performing a dance. But then the picture flew apart into black shards spinning through the sky like a startled flock of crows. My mother ran toward the woods. Van Drood followed her, but before he could reach her he was set upon by the black crows. They swarmed over him, as they had the prince in the Merope story, devouring him.
And why not? van Drood whispered, his voice almost gentle inside my head. What did I have left? Why stay with the Order when I had lost the one thing that made being a part of them worthwhile? When their rules and regulations—their damned old ways!—had cost me the love of my life? I left. I learned the truth behind the Order. And learned how to destroy them. They’re such fools that they don’t understand that the things they hunt are what keep the world free of the shadows. Without the Darklings, the balance between shadow and light will be destroyed. The shadows will rule. I will rule! They’ve already made themselves into vessels with all their training. Look at them! They’re no better than puppets!
I heard a gasp from behind me and turned to see the Dianas’ bows trained on Dame Beckwith.
Fools! They don’t realize that their training makes it easier for me to get inside their heads. They’ve made it very easy over the years for me to turn them into slaves, just as I’ve made this one my servant.
Someone behind me stepped forward and grabbed my arm, trying to wrest the feather away from me.
I spun around to face Euphorbia Frost—because who else could he have meant by my servant—and came face to face with Sarah Lehman instead. She smiled at me . . . and black smoke poured out of her mouth.
“Sarah!” I cried. “Why . . . ?”
“Why should I be loyal to these people who treat me like a slave?” she asked. “Why should you? These are the women who drove your mother away because she’d polluted herself by contact with the Darklings.”
“I gave her a choice,” Dame Beckwith said, her voice firm but her eyes riveted to the bows of the Dianas. “Stay and renounce the Darklings or go. She chose to go.”
“She gave Louisa the same choice the day she ran into the woods,” Sarah said. “She’d fallen in love with a Darkling, too. It was easy to lead her into the woods promising to take her to the Darklings—easy to lead her into Faerie instead.”
“You led her into Faerie?” Dame Beckwith roared.
“Yes, me!” Sarah turned on Dame Beckwith, smoke now billowing out of her mouth and eyes and fingertips. The smoke filled and surrounded her, the shadows cloaking her like a cape. She was the one who had called the tenebrae into Blythewood and she was their beacon now. Van Drood wasn’t here in the flesh; he was acting through his servant, Sarah Lehman, and through the tenebrae she had summoned.
“She said she was my friend, but she was happy to leave me for her Darkling lover. She left me all alone with you.” She swept her finger in a wide arc at the crowd of teachers and students, smoke gushing from her mouth, fire sparking off her fingertips. Her gaze fell on Dame Beckwith and her voice suddenly changed. “I was your slave!” she cried in a voice that made Dame Beckwith cry out like a wounded bird. It wasn’t Sarah’s voice any longer. It was Judicus van Drood’s.
He was inside her as he’d been inside me a moment ago. I’d let that voice inside me because I’d let a bit of darkness ins
ide me as I watched the candelabellum and doubted my mother— or maybe that bit of darkness had first gotten inside me the day she died, when I first thought that if she had really loved me she wouldn’t have killed herself. That darkness had been growing since that day, feeding on every bad and ungenerous thought— my jealousy of the girls who had more than me, my fears of being despised, of going mad. I’d let the shadows inside me, just as Sarah had. If I didn’t expel them now they would devour me, just as they had devoured Sarah and threatened now to destroy everyone at Blythewood.
A wall of smoke billowed over Sarah’s head, heading for the front line, for Miss Frost and Mr. Bellows, Miss Sharp, Miss Corey and my friends—Helen and Daisy, Beatrice and Dolores, Cam . . . everyone at Blythewood. Looking at them now, torchlight flickering on their faces, shadows looming around them, I saw a mottled ground of light and dark, like the dappled things in Miss Sharp’s poem—light and shadow, a dazzle dim. I saw Helen’s vanity but also her loyalty, the Jagers’ gloom but also their stalwart hearts, Miss Frost’s cruelty but also her love for her old teacher. Even Daisy, who shone like a beacon in the shadows, had a flicker of darkness inside her, a doubt that she still loved Mr. Appleby after all she’d seen and learned at Blythewood. And even Sarah, so consumed by darkness, still had a spark of light within her: the love she’d had for Louisa.
I turned then and looked at the woods. The light of the blazing feather in my hand burned through the wall of shadows. I could see past the line of Darklings to the lampsprites and goblins and all the other creatures of Faerie, strange and horrible and sometimes beautiful. They, too, dwelled in shadow and light, neither wholly good nor wholly bad.
And then there were the Darklings. A line of them stood between the shadows and the woods. Their black wings glinted in the torchlight, their faces like carved marble. I saw Raven’s face alive with anger and love. They, most of all, possessed both shadow and light. They stood in between. They kept the balance. Without them the world would be overrun by shadows.
That’s why van Drood wanted them destroyed—and he was using the Order to do it.
Behind me I could hear the Dianas drawing back their bows. In front of me I could hear the rustling of the Darklings’ wings and beyond them the growl and chitter of goblin and trow. The shadows writhed between them, hungry for blood on both sides. They were growing stronger at the mere anticipation of bloodshed. Once they’d fed on blood they would be unstoppable. Van Drood would be unstoppable. I felt him, even though he wasn’t here in the flesh, feeding off the shadows, just as they fed off the anger and hate in the crowd. The shadows needed his hate as a channel just as I used the repeater as a channel for my bells.
The repeater. Could I use it to channel my bells now to defeat van Drood? But how? All it did was repeat the bells in my head. Could I get it to repeat the danger bell in my head?
As I drew out the watch and pressed the stem, the repeater played back the bass bell, but it sounded weak and tinny on the little watch. I heard van Drood laughing inside my head. That only worked on me in the village because I was unprepared. You can’t hurt me with your bells or that pathetic device.
It was true. What did I have in my little repertoire of bells? The treble that I heard when I was with Raven . . .
The repeater played back the treble bells, intermingling it with the bass bell.
Van Drood laughed again in my head. Do you think you can fight me with love? he mocked. No, I hadn’t . . . but did van Drood’s laugh sound just a little bit frightened? Was it possible that he was still susceptible to love? And a little bit frightened of it?
He laughed again—a laugh that echoed in the rattle of bows and the growl of goblins. If I could look again on van Drood, would I see a spark of light left in him?
“Is that why you’re not here in the flesh?” I asked aloud. “Because you don’t want me to see that spark of light left in you?”
“There is no spark left in me!” he roared, his voice suddenly filling Sarah’s mouth. “Your mother made sure of that!”
The rage he felt for my mother made the bass bell ring louder, but also the treble bell. There was still a spark of love in all that rage. I knew now what I had to do. Although it was painful to use it like this, I played the tune my mother used to sing to me in my head. I heard her voice—and then I heard it echoed in the repeater, strong and clear now.
“Do you think that silly ditty means anything to me?” he snarled from Sarah’s mouth.
But I thought I heard something in his voice that told me it did mean something to him. And not just to him. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Dame Beckwith’s face crease with pain as if it brought up painful memories for her too. I played the tune over in my head, concentrating on my mother’s voice, picturing my mother’s face as she sang. When the repeater played the tune again, it was piercingly loud and unbearably sweet. I could have sworn I heard my mother’s voice in the chimes. It brought tears to my eyes . . . and silenced van Drood. Then I heard him utter a low moan that shook the trees and made the shadows shrink away.
It was working! He was withdrawing his presence, and without his guiding force the shadows were losing substance and his influence was waning from his servants. The Dianas put down their bows, Miss Frost wavered on her feet—Sir Malmsbury leapt forward to catch her—and Sarah seemed to shrink two inches. She clutched her chest as if the wind had just been knocked out of her. She stared at me, her eyes wide and liquid in the torchlight.
“It’s all right,” I said softly, as if gentling a hawk. “He’s gone.”
“He’s gone!” she shrieked, her voice so horrid that even the shadows recoiled from her—and then gusted back, hungry for the waves of anger rising from her. “What am I now without him but a pathetic servant? You . . .” She pointed at me. “You took him from me!”
She leapt so quickly I didn’t have time to think. Instinctively, I thrust out my arm to keep her from me—only I had the blazing feather in that hand. The shadows writhing around her caught fire like a cone of spun sugar. A pillar of flame surrounded Sarah. I heard a wild shriek of pain and smelled hair and flesh singeing. She was on fire, and just like the girls at the Triangle, she would burn to death, all because van Drood had come for me. I couldn’t let her die this way. I lunged at her, determined to smother the flames that were engulfing her with my own body, but as we hit the ground I heard the sound of wings. The Darklings, I thought. They’ve come to take my soul to Faerie. I felt something heavy fall, a wall of darkness, and I knew nothing else.
37
THE WORLD WAS born in fire and ice, Mr. Bellows had taught us in the mythology section of his class. According to the Norse myths the fires of Muspelheim mingled with the frosts of Niflheim to create the frost giant Ymir, out of whose body the earth and all its creatures sprung. In the weeks that followed the Night of the Shadows—as it came to be known in Blythewood lore—I had an inkling how Ymir must have felt. My body was a battleground between the warring forces of fire and ice: the fire I had raised out of the Darkling feather and the black ice let loose by the shadow creatures.
Miss Corey, who sat beside my bed for the two weeks I lay unconscious, told me afterward that the flames from my feather torch had ignited the shadow creatures. “They turned into a roiling mass of fire, shrieking and sizzling. What was most horrible was that inside the mass we could see struggling bodies and faces screaming in pain and terror—the souls of the beings who had been taken over by the tenebrae—including Sarah Lehman.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, horror-stricken that I had killed the girl who had been my first friend at Blythewood. Even though she had been van Drood’s spy I had seen a spark of humanity inside her.
“We’re not sure. Once you set them on fire, smoke rose into the sky. We saw shapes rising with it, and then the smoke was blown away, although there was no wind.”
“The Darklings,” I said, remembering a sound that had reached me in the depths of my darkness. “I heard their wings; they must ha
ve used them to fan the smoke away.”
“Perhaps,” Miss Corey said, busying herself then with the bandages on my hands. “When the smoke cleared we didn’t see them. Dame Beckwith ordered a retreat. We had to get you back to the infirmary to treat your burns.”
I looked down at my hands, which were swathed in white gauze. The worst of the pain was there and along my shoulder blades. I’d been afraid when I first saw the big clumsy bandages that they covered two stumps. But when the nurse uncovered them I was surprised to see that although the flesh was pink and shiny, my hands were whole and strangely unscarred. It still hurt to move them, but Miss Corey promised they would heal completely in time.
“If you hadn’t thrown a cloak over me to douse the fire I wouldn’t have survived,” I said.
“I didn’t throw a cloak over you,” she said, looking away. “It was the Darkling. He flew straight through the flames and covered you with his wings. At first we thought he was attacking you. One of the Dianas shot him—”
“Shot him?” I cried, my hands flying to my own heart. “Was he . . . ?”
The corner of Miss Corey’s mouth lifted. “It was Charlotte, and she only grazed his wing.” The small smile faded from her lips. “He was able to fly away, but when he went back through the flames his wings caught on fire. I’m afraid . . .”
“You think he died in the fire?” I asked, fear searing up from my heart like the flames that had enveloped Raven.
Miss Corey took my hand. “I’m not really sure. I never would have admitted that one of those creatures could be . . . good. But I saw him risk his own life for you. If it’s any consolation it’s changed how I think of the Darklings.”
“But it hasn’t changed everyone’s minds, has it?”
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