Alice swallowed thickly. She had sent her nightjar away. Not far enough to break the cord – but further than she should have. And in the distance between them something had slipped out, something strong and deadly that had consumed the life pulsing through the branches – something that had saved her life. Something she did not want to name.
What’s wrong with me?
The sawdust on the floor began to shift as if blown by an unseen wind to reveal letters freshly gouged onto the wood. A message, carved into the grain: MURDERER. Alice’s breath hitched.
Then the floorboards creaked outside her living quarters. Light footsteps pattered in the corridor outside. But with Holly dead and her family long gone, no one else but Alice lived at this end of the corridor. She ran for the door – snatching the cricket bat as she passed – and flung it open, her chest heaving.
The corridor was empty.
Alice slumped back against the wall, her head pounding but her mind suddenly tack sharp.
Lester.
Her jaw clenched and she slammed the door shut.
‘Are you listening?’ asked Bea, elbowing Alice as they crossed the university gardens.
Alice started guiltily – she hadn’t been listening at all. Her hand drifted up to her neck where the thorny vines had pressed their spikes into her skin. She’d spent hours thinking about the carved message. Murderer. And hours studying the window frame which had once blossomed with Holly’s uninvited roses. She shuddered involuntarily. The message was wrong. She’d helped Holly; there was no doubt in her mind about that. What worried her was how instinctively it had happened. That, and whether someone knew what she’d done in the grove that night. Yet it hardly seemed possible. Alice had barely known what she was doing, and no one could have seen her nightjar slice Holly’s cord – not even Lester.
In the stairwell, he’d thrown out accusations to shift his guilt, even suggesting she’d sabotaged Holly out of jealousy. I saw you . . . I watched you. Was it possible he had seen something to paint her with suspicion – not her nightjar, but something? Or was he only calling her a murderer because she could have broken his neck letting him fall down the stairs?
The possibility that Lester might make another attempt was at the back of her mind, but wasn’t her primary concern. Greater was the awful worry that, for an instant, her soul had been freed – or, if Reid and Magellan were to be believed, a part of it at least. Her nightjar had failed to restrain it; her Tuoni legacy was too strong. She had to get it under control, or she would become a danger to everyone around her.
‘The Juhannus?’ Bea prompted, herding Alice towards the janitor’s shed door.
Alice glanced at her. She hadn’t been able to tell Bea about the attack. If Lester did know something – even if he was only bluffing – she couldn’t take the risk of losing her mentor and friend. If Bea really knew what she was . . .
‘Alice,’ said Bea. ‘Are you all right?’
‘What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking. Did you report Lester to Whitmore in the end?’ Maybe he’d been reprimanded and that had been his catalyst last night.
Bea shook her head. ‘No. I think it would knock Tom even more if he felt responsible for the big idiot’s membership being revoked. I want to wring his neck, darling, but . . .’ She sighed. ‘Tom has suggested mediation.’
Alice pulled a horrified face. Lester could’ve killed him. Her hand drifted to her neck again.
‘Yes,’ said Bea, nodding in agreement and shooing her through the door to the void. ‘Precisely. Anyway, forget that great pillock. About the Juhannus—’
The door shut, and darkness folded around them, but not before Alice saw Bea raise an eyebrow at her blank face.
‘The Midsummer Festival,’ said Bea. ‘We won’t go to the big festival at Hyde Park. Everyone goes there and it’s always full of students. We’re doing the one at Crane Park Island – the Ukon Juhla. It’s smaller and more intimate. The focus is more on the traditional, pre-Christian celebration – in honour of Ukko the thunder god rather than John “Juhannus” the Baptist. Plus the food is to die for. There’ll be bonfires – kokko – by the river Crane, hot food, drink, music, pagan rituals . . . You’ll love it. You have to come.’
Alice hesitated. ‘Maybe.’
She shivered and huddled closer to her mentor. They couldn’t see each other’s faces clearly in the void, but Alice felt Bea’s chest inflate with indignation at her lack of commitment. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to go, but now didn’t seem the right time for a frivolous excursion. She still had two tests to concentrate on, and the small matter of her deathly soul and Lester, her new sworn enemy, to worry about.
‘Midsummer is our biggest festival,’ said Bea with feeling, ‘and we only have weeks to prepare.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, but if you don’t embrace this tradition, our friendship is over and you’re going to have to leave the Rookery forever.’
Alice forced a smile and tried to rouse her spirits. ‘Tad overdramatic,’ she said. ‘But fine. I’ll come.’
‘Excellent,’ said Bea, clapping her hands with delight. ‘You’ve got less than a week to get things ready.’ She thrust open a well-hidden door and light poured into the barren space.
‘What “things”?’ Alice said suspiciously as they stepped out into a busy street.
Bea gave her a coquettish smile. ‘We’re single. That means we’re midsummer maidens, darling. If we pick seven flowers from seven different meadows and leave them under our pillow at midsummer, tradition says we’ll see our true love’s face in a dream.’ She paused and gave an offhand shrug. ‘And if you want one blessed with a pretty face, the growing wisdom is you have to pick the flowers naked.’
‘Oh God,’ said Alice.
‘Or if you go to a river – naked – you’ll see the face of your true love reflected in the water.’
Alice’s cheeks warmed and she looked away. Romance was about as far from her mind these days as . . . well, as Crowley. Which was to say, not far enough.
‘I didn’t think you cared about meeting anyone,’ said Alice.
‘I don’t,’ said Bea. ‘But we owe it to our ancestors to uphold the traditions. Especially the one where the midsummer maiden rolls around in a wheat field—’
‘Naked?’ Alice asked.
‘Of course. Then it means she’s destined to meet her future husband before the next Juhannus.’
‘Do the men ever get naked in these traditions?’
‘If I’m rolling around in a wheat field with my knickers off, darling, I certainly hope so.’
She laughed throatily and marched across the road, towards their destination. Alice watched her go, struggling to maintain the happy mood in Bea’s absence. Her footsteps slowed at the memory of Crowley’s face, attempting to smile at the imagined relationship between her and Tom. She’d tried so hard never to think of him; in the year apart, she’d put herself first, focusing on what she needed to do to survive Tuoni’s cursed genes. She hadn’t wanted pity or help; she’d just wanted to move on and fix things herself.
Alice could accept he’d made amends as best he could. Forced to choose, he’d sacrificed the thing that had mattered most to him in the world to save her: his sister’s nightjar and her one chance to recover from a coma. Yet, there was still a mental block, a wall she’d built to protect herself – not from him, but from the emotions he might stir in her. Nothing could be allowed to distract her from her purpose. Not the uncertainties Crowley engendered in her, not anything. She sighed heavily and hurried across the road after Bea.
The Abbey Library in Bermondsey was so imposing it could be seen from several streets away. Rising from a cobbled square, it stamped its authority on the busy landscape and cast deep shadows over those who stood in its presence. Originally, the site had belonged to an eighth-century monastery and then to a Benedictine order. In London, the building had been destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. In the Rookery, however, it had remained standing, used not
as a place of worship in the traditional sense but to house the Summer Tree.
‘Oh look,’ said Bea, gesturing at a hodgepodge of stalls crowding one end of the square. ‘The Travelling Market’s here. I wonder if they’ll have anything I can wear to the festival.’
‘I’ve never understood why it’s inside,’ Alice murmured.
‘It’s a street market,’ said Bea, staring at her as though she was mad. ‘It’s outside.’
‘I mean the Summer Tree,’ said Alice. ‘The replica is allowed its freedom, planted in some Rookery forest somewhere—’
‘No, it’s not,’ said Bea, diverting them towards the market. ‘It’s in Oxleas Wood in South East London.’
Alice stared at her, surprised, and then darted after the librarian as she plunged through the thin crowd of people milling around the makeshift stalls.
‘It’s . . .?’ She snagged Bea’s sleeve. ‘You mean to say the grove that Holly—that the binding draught is taken in London?’
‘Yes. You’re wondering why the place isn’t full of humans who’ve stumbled across it by accident,’ said Bea with a knowing grin. ‘Darling, those people only see what they want to see.’
‘But—’
‘And of course the House has made sure to hide it from view completely. It’s in a small, hidden grove we cultivated ourselves. They couldn’t find it if they tried; the only point of access is that door in the House.’
Alice stared at Bea. Crowley had offered to hide her parents’ house in Ireland. So such a thing was possible?
‘If entire houses and groves can be hidden with magic,’ she asked, ‘why are we not all living in London? If the Beaks can’t see those places, then—’
‘Oh God, no,’ said Bea. ‘Would you really want to? And besides, do you have any idea how much magical skill is required to hide a place? I doubt even the House governors have legacies powerful enough for that any more.’
Alice frowned. Maybe Crowley had just been showing off.
Bea’s eyes drifted over a table of beaded necklaces. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding a garish gold and fire opal necklace to her throat.
‘I think the Mayor of London probably wants his chain of office back,’ said Alice.
Bea sighed and replaced the necklace, waving away the trader, who tried to pass a dozen others into her hands. ‘Seen anything you like?’ she asked.
Alice glanced around the small market. The stalls seemed to consist mainly of haberdasheries and curios. There were tabletops laden with painted masks, corked bottles of drinking water from the river Walbrook, gift boxes of asbestos-suede fireproof gloves and stacks of yellowed letters handwritten in faded ink. She wondered why anyone would buy second-hand letters, and then her eyes fell on a stall selling Petrified-wood tables, House Pellervoinen certified! The tables glistened with a polished sheen, and Alice moved closer to study them. Marble patterns rippled across their surface, yet there were wood-like knots and a grain. She rapped one with her knuckle, and it rang with a deep bass as though stone rather than wood.
‘Can I interest you in this beauty?’ tempted the trader – a long-haired old man in a waistcoat. ‘Originally from fossilized oak, this one’s made of quartz and silica minerals. Look at the way it catches the light. Or this one – opalized rowan?’
Alice shook her head, bemused.
‘This ornamental piece, then?’ suggested the trader, snatching up a piece of dull grey stone that appeared to have been cut to look like a piece of tree trunk. ‘Top-quality stone trees, with the grain intact just like nature intended. They fetch a high price but I’m willing to let you have it for—’
‘Stone trees? Like nature intended?’ said Alice sceptically.
‘Pellervoinen-certified,’ he threw in eagerly. ‘These ones were petrified by their finest craftsmen.’
She shook her head. Stone trees? ‘I’ll leave it. Thanks.’ She spotted Bea near the tail end of the stall’s stock, next to a display of Finest House Mielikki living furniture. There were intricately carved cherry and beech wood chairs sprouting flowers and foliage. The tapered shape of the leaves reminded her of those belonging to another tree . . .
‘The Summer Tree,’ said Alice.
Bea raised an amused eyebrow. ‘I’m afraid it’s not for sale, darling.’
‘What?’ said Alice, with a confused laugh. ‘No, I mean the fact it’s inside; it just doesn’t seem right.’
Alice moved through the throng with Bea following behind. The smell of fried onions and hot roasted chestnuts wafted closer and her stomach rumbled involuntarily. Towards the edges of the market, the miscellaneous clutter gave way to food stalls. Smouldering metal drums had been lined up on the kerb and were spilling charcoal smoke into the air. Round metal plates punctured with holes rested on top of the drums, slowly cooking heaps of dark chestnuts, their skins cracked open and revealing the tender, nutty flesh inside.
Alice quashed her sudden craving and peered up at the abbey’s bell tower. It was wrapped in ivy and its spire pierced the clouds. ‘The miniature is outside, enjoying the wild freedoms of nature, and the most important tree ever grown is trapped in a building in the middle of a city. It just seems wrong.’
‘It’s Pellervoinen’s fault,’ said Bea. ‘Apparently. The story goes that it was a power play. Mielikki had created her greatest work – a tree with life-giving properties, securing the Rookery’s foundations so that it didn’t crumble – and then Pellervoinen slapped an enormous abbey around it, ultimately trapping her tree in a stone prison.’
‘Ah, so a real gentleman,’ said Alice as they trekked away from the entreating cries of the market sellers and towards the imposing abbey.
‘Exactly,’ said Bea, pulling aside the heavy entrance door. ‘A man trying to compensate for his insecurities with an act of aggression,’ she added in her cut-glass voice as they stepped into the abbey. ‘Who’d have thought it?’
The abbey’s bell tower was an empty shell, and the long nave inside – which should have held aisles, wooden benches and an altar – was simply an enormous dusty room. Its only feature was the hole in the floor which announced a winding subterranean staircase. The wonders of the Abbey Library were far below ground.
Alice followed Bea through the hole and down the worn stairwell. The oil lamps illuminated roughly hewn walls that became smoother the lower she went. Corridors sloped off from the stairs, receding into darkness, but Alice stayed the course until they emerged together onto the upper floor of a vast atrium.
The library was the most magnificent open space she had seen. The earth below the abbey’s shell had been hollowed out. Far above them, in the cobbled square behind the bell tower, was a cordoned-off glass surface that acted as a vast skylight for the underground library. In the centre of the atrium stood a two-hundred-foot-tall tree: the Summer Tree. Its leafy crown reached far over Alice’s head to press against the glass ceiling, which was bracketed with elegant steel girders arching up from the upper stonework.
Leaves spilled from the tree’s branches, beautifully tapered: matt green on one side and a glossy, richer green on the other. The tree’s twisted trunk was buried in the atrium floor five storeys below, and flagstones lay over its swollen roots.
She paused for a moment to appreciate the tree’s immensity. It seemed to throb with life and reminded her of a caged animal, fighting to free itself. Stooped boughs were crushed against the walls; branches and twigs curled around corners and ran along corridors, their spindly shoots coiling around pillars and arches. A granite staircase wrapped around the tree and landings ran off it, leading to other floors filled with narrow passageways, shelves and alcoves, all spilling over with books.
The early evening sky outside was dull, but the atrium was alight with the glow of tens of thousands of fireflies. Signs everywhere warned visitors not to touch them – the Lampyridae. They had been known to bite.
Alice followed Bea down the staircase to the courtyard on the ground floor. Around them, and moving purpose
fully along corridors, were librarians wearing black aprons with front pockets full of books. Other members drifted around, leafing through journals and stacks of reading materials.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Bea murmured. ‘This doesn’t . . . feel right.’
Alice glanced at her, but Bea was staring up at the leaves with a frown.
A handful of people wearing small wooden badges on their collars were also ignoring the library’s stock, and were, like Bea, focused only on the Summer Tree. They moved with quiet industry, murmuring among themselves, hurrying to inspect the roots with an extended clinometer and standing back to peer up at the branches. Alice watched as a man with red hair in a severe parting approached the trunk, a tape measure in hand and a pair of polished mahogany-and-leather binoculars hanging from his neck.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Alice, distracting Bea from whatever had caused her to frown.
There was a long pause as they stared at the man, fascinated. His face was as red as his hair as he repeatedly approached and retreated from the tree in a crab-like motion. It was like watching a matador dance with an invisible bull.
‘I think . . . he’s trying to measure the tree’s girth without the fireflies turning on him,’ said Bea. ‘He hasn’t got a chance. They’re rebuffing him quite politely so far, but if he persists he’ll be lucky not to lose an arm.’
The fireflies – stationed at the tree to protect it from potential attackers – were carnivorous.
‘Which reminds me,’ said Bea, turning to Alice. ‘Keep your distance. The only reason they haven’t yet gone for his throat is that they can sense he’s bound to the tree they’re protecting, and so less likely to do it any harm. You, however, with your one portion of the draught, don’t have that same security.’
Alice nodded, turning from the redhead and his increasingly daring lunges. She had seen the fireflies at work the previous year; they’d savaged August’s arm like a pack of wild dogs. She knew the risks – but they hadn’t attacked her then, though they’d had the opportunity.
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