The Rookery

by Deborah Hewitt

  She stared down at him, her face softening. ‘Don’t make me do this,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t make me choose.’

  He glanced up at her, and his face was a study in perfect misery. He had no choice. Didn’t she understand? He’d given up who he was. Everything he had been, he’d abandoned. He couldn’t lose her now, not when he’d spent so many lifetimes waiting to find her. And she deserved to live. She was everything good in the world; she’d earned a place here. What use was his stolen life if she wasn’t in it?

  Leda stiffened, and then nodded with steely resolve. ‘So be it,’ she said. ‘It’s all I can do.’

  And then she closed the door on him, her voice carried away by the wind blustering through the void.

  Alice lost her grip on the street. It was swept out from under her, and a new memory formed. A ticking clock in the gloom.

  He sat in the darkness of his living room, staring blankly at the wall. The moon’s light curved through his window, illuminating the clock face on the wall. Time was irrelevant now. Everything . . . was irrelevant now. She was dead. He had failed, and she was dead. The child? Somewhere. Perhaps. Perhaps it too was dead. Perhaps they were together, and he was the only one alone. Left behind. Trapped.

  What she had done was monstrous. And yet, he was equal to it. He would never see her again. She had robbed him of that. They would never reunite. Not even on the moors: a consequence of her decision. He was trapped here until the end. Leda must have known it, but she’d deemed it an acceptable consequence to keep the child safe. She had sacrificed her own life. But she had also sacrificed his chance of a true death.

  He prodded his chest but the skin was numb. He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes tracking for the familiar sight of his nightjar, but it too was gone. No Leda. No nightjar. No itse. Leda had taken it and imprisoned it in the Summer Tree. Balance. Pellervoinen had once provided the counterweight, with the London Stone’s twin here in the Rookery, but Leda had severed it. To maintain the balance the tree required, she had parcelled up part of his soul and offered it to the Summer Tree as a bond: his raw, deadly soul neutralizing the all-consuming life bursting from Mielikki’s tree.

  It was the itse-soul that travelled to the moors after death. Without his, he would never return to his homeland and he would never reunite with Leda. He would be trapped, and they would always be apart. His only hope of restitution was to reverse what she had done, to liberate his soul and go to her. Let this puppet body go, and seek her out in the moors.

  He stood abruptly, his eyes falling on a book lit by the moonlight on his shelf. He snatched it up, scanning the title with desperation. This was her book. She had carried it with her like a bible. How many of her secrets might he uncover? Perhaps it could reveal to him how she had done it – and how it could be undone.

  Magellan’s Metaphysical Treatise: Sielun.

  He stroked the cover her fingers had once held. Leda had considered herself an expert on Magellan. She’d had access to his private papers and manuscripts – not because of her Council position but because she’d been a Westergard and the name carried weight. He needed that same access; he would scour the Rookery for information about Magellan. And once he had it, he would make plans to release his soul from the tree. To be reunited with Leda in the moors. To forgive her, and to beg her forgiveness in turn.

  Alice’s hand slipped from the nightjar’s soft feathers and the atrium blinked into existence around her. The walls tilted and the tree see-sawed across her vision. She threw out a hand for stability, but there was nothing to grab. She swung sideways and clattered to the floor, the sharp edges of the flagstones pressing into the side of her ribcage. Deep breath. Deep breath. Alice drew her knees up to her chest and pressed her fists into her eyes. Deep breath.

  When she finally looked up, wincing, the light was still too bright, too stark. She lurched to her feet and peered up at the tree. Where had the nightjar gone? There was no sign of it. Maybe it was crouching on a branch, camouflaged by the dense thicket of leaves, watching her. She hadn’t summoned the bird; it had come to her of its own accord.

  Tuoni’s nightjar.

  Tuoni’s nightjar was tied to this tree because part of his soul was caged inside it. Her face paled and she reeled backwards at the thought. Leda had used her link to Mielikki to push a soul into her tree. A soul.

  Alice clapped a hand to her mouth, muffling a moan of horror and realization. Leda had done this for her. Tuoni had been so determined to save Leda he’d set out to kill his unborn child. So she’d trapped the most dangerous part of him to keep Alice safe.

  A chill swept through Alice’s body. If the Rookery Stone had been the original counterweight and Leda had swapped it for Tuoni’s soul . . . she must have assumed that his powers of death would keep the Summer Tree’s powers of life in check. But something had gone wrong, because the tree’s growth was now unrestricted; it was damaging the Rookery, obliterating buildings and streets and tearing the land in two.

  Tuoni had wanted to free his soul. With the original link severed, the price would be the Summer Tree’s growth. Had Tuoni been successful – in part, at least? Where was he now, and what had he found in Magellan’s writings? What had . . .?

  Her hand fell away from her mouth. Magellan . . . the Magellan Institute. Tuoni had been determined to retrace Leda’s steps, and they had taken him to Magellan’s manuscripts.

  Alice shuddered, a sickness deep in her belly. Who, exactly, had Reid been working for? Was the Magellan Estate simply Tuoni masquerading as a wealthy financial backer? Reid had blamed herself for Crane Park Island. Had Reid destroyed her research to stop this – because Tuoni was using her findings to free his soul?

  The campus was deathly quiet when Alice made her way across the gardens many hours later, with Tilda’s two books clutched in one hand. The mulberry trees swayed drunkenly in the breeze, the only sign of movement. Some of the students and staff living on-site had left, driven out by fear of the university falling into a sinkhole like the streets by the Thames. She had Coram House, if she’d wanted to leave, but it was no safer there than here. Her friends had been busy trying to reinforce the building when she’d slipped out; she’d told them she needed some time to think.

  Alice skirted the side of the Sydenham Building and made her way to her favourite bench in the quadrangle. It was almost midnight, and thick grey clouds hid the moon; it was dark, cold and calm. There were no lights on in the windows of the Arlington Building. Word had probably spread that there had been another incident with the Summer Tree; no doubt it would be morning before they realized it was a false alarm.

  She swung her knees up and lay on the bench, hugging the folder to her chest and looking up at the marbled sky. There were more stars in the Rookery than in London – not because they had a greater number but because with the poor electricity systems here, there was less light pollution to camouflage them. She searched for the North Star, but wherever it was, she couldn’t find it.

  She remembered her dad, when she was a teenager, trying to teach her about the constellations. He’d focused on Aquila and Cygnus, patiently drawing them when she’d been unable to see them, embellishing them with feathers and wings and beaks to show her there were birds made of stars, and weren’t they beautiful? But she’d never been able to follow the join-the-dots path he’d tried to make with his finger, no matter how many times he’d traced them across the skies for her.

  ‘It doesn’t matter that you can’t see my birds,’ he’d told her. ‘I know they’re there, just over my shoulder every night. I can appreciate them for what they are, because they really are beautiful, but I can ignore them too. When it’s daytime, I can’t see them at all. And at night, I can choose to step into the garden and admire them if I want to. I decide.’

  She’d boxed away her own birds soon after, the ones she’d decided not to see – the nightjars that haunted her every waking moment. Of course, she’d thought they were hallucinations at the time, but her dad had tried to give
her some control over them, some agency. He had always put the reins in her hands, always encouraged her to make her own decisions. She’d made some bad ones, undoubtedly, but they’d been hers and no one else’s. He’d always been proud of her independence and her wilfulness, even when he’d hoped she might temper it with caution. Well here she was, learning at last.

  Alice sat up and wrapped her arms around herself. The mulberry tree in the centre of the quad had grown. Its berries were brighter and heavy with juices, its canopy a little wider. Maybe all the trees in the Rookery would benefit from the Summer Tree’s domination. Unchecked, it might churn up the land, but new life might blossom in the cracks. Perhaps nature would flourish as it once had, before the world had been concreted over. House Mielikki would certainly rise above the other Houses then. If there were any left.

  She smoothed a hand over the book cover. Whitmore’s torn papers had been useful, from a theoretical standpoint. But the book crammed with drawings and annotations had, in the end, proven more useful still. They’d added a practical element to Whitmore’s book of theory.

  The handwritten notes in different inks and styles – some in Latin, others in English – were laid out erratically. Sentences scattered here and there across the pages, expanding on a paragraph or a phrase written by someone else, like a collective body of research. The newer additions, Alice had finally realized, were in Leda’s handwriting. She’d lined the diary and the book side by side, scrutinizing their form – the way Leda looped some of her letters, the sharp angles on the others – until she was in no doubt. Without meaning to, Leda had left her a breadcrumb trail through the pages.

  Alice had tried to show the annotations to Crowley, but he hadn’t been able to see, neither the newer nor the older text. She was glad, in the end, that he hadn’t been able to read Leda’s words. If he had known what was expected of her, he would try to stop her. He would try to save her.

  A memory rose sharply in her mind. Wet through and shivering, Crowley at her back, his arm wrapped tightly around her. I’m not letting you go. She swallowed hard and leaned back to look up at the stars.

  ‘Kuu?’ she murmured.

  Her nightjar appeared, fluttering down to rest on her lap. She stroked its pale feathers, ignoring the tightness in her throat as it leaned into her touch. The glowing cord on her wrist pulsed vividly, highlighting the sheen on Kuu’s wings.

  Tree becomes stone, and stone becomes tree. Leda had annotated the words in the margins. Alice glanced over at the lawns, where the Cream of the Crops competition had once taken place. The students from Houses Mielikki and Pellervoinen had fought a contest there, the Pellervoinens attempting to petrify a piece of wood, to fossilize it by replacing its elements with minerals. To be successful, the wood couldn’t be allowed to rot, or there would be nothing for the stone to replace. Petrification needed water and heat, but no oxygen. Those were the ingredients in petrification by normal means. A process that took millions of years in a world without magic.

  Tree and stone must be bound together to fix the broken link between the anchors. Joined completely – fused together – in a way that hardly seemed possible. Leda’s annotations had been useful, but Alice couldn’t quite picture what she was expected to do, or how. It was . . . too big. She could see the smaller parts, but not the whole.

  Water. Heat. No oxygen. It couldn’t be allowed to rot.

  Alice’s eyes traced Kuu’s cord – so bright, so vivid. So warm, when she touched it. Raw power and energy. Enough, perhaps, to generate the heat required. The nightjar churred softly and nuzzled at her fingers, and Alice had to look away.

  Mielikki had used her cord’s energy to fuse her tree to Pellervoinen’s stone. And Alice would follow in her footsteps. She would sever her nightjar cord to complete the ritual. Kuu would leave her for good. And to prevent her deadly soul from escaping and striking down an innocent – as it almost had at Marble Arch – Alice would step into the Sulka Moors, the Land of Death, where she belonged – where she could do no harm. Forever.

  ‘Alice? Is that you?’

  She sat up again, peering over the back of the wooden bench.

  ‘Bea?’ she murmured, her nightjar vanishing at the sound of the librarian’s approaching footsteps.

  ‘I’ve been searching for you for hours,’ said Bea, breathless. ‘Governor Whitmore wants you to take your final test tomorrow. I think the timing is awful, and the whole thing should be postponed, but he was adamant.’

  Alice nodded. Of course he was. He wasn’t just adamant, he was desperate. He thought she stood a chance of fixing this mess. And so she would. And maybe, along the way, she would seek out Tuoni at last and make sure he could never threaten the city’s safety again. She closed her eyes. What a curse her parents had been on the Rookery. Yet now it was time to dig deep into her soul and learn which part of her was strong enough to save it: Tuoni or Mielikki.

  ‘Dandelions?’ said Alice as they hurried along King Edward Street. The atmosphere in the Rookery had changed; people seemed to scurry everywhere, heads down and with little time to waste.

  ‘Watch out!’

  A bearded man with a thick waist swung a suitcase apparently filled with all his worldly goods directly into Alice’s path. She veered around him, the corner of his suitcase clipping her ankle.

  ‘Singular,’ amended Bea as they both paused to watch the man lug his heavy suitcase away. Was this a sign that people were abandoning the city? But where would they find safety? In the mainland with the Beaks?

  ‘One dandelion,’ said Bea, refocusing on the matter at hand. ‘It’s nicknamed The Dandelion Test.’ She tugged absentmindedly on her necklace. ‘It’s an unexpected choice,’ she said, glancing at Alice. ‘I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but . . . Cecil told me that Whitmore wanted to push through the last batch of membership applications quickly. Only you and one other made it to the final test.’

  ‘Shobhna? The woman from the knotweed forest?’

  She nodded. ‘But Cecil got the impression Whitmore was treating it as a formality – hurrying them through because, frankly, the House has enough to deal with right now. Honestly, darling, we both assumed it would mean you’d be given one of the easier final tests.’

  Alice tried to keep her face blank. The timing was right. The test was only a means to an end now. She just needed the final portion of binding draught to tie her to the tree so that she could sacrifice herself in its honour.

  Bea tutted loudly and Alice mentally scrambled to catch up. ‘For Whitmore to turn around and select The Dandelion Test, he’s not gone for the easy option at all, and yet—’

  ‘Dandelions sound pretty innocuous,’ said Alice. ‘What exactly does this process . . . entail?’ she finished cautiously. Alice held her breath, fearing she’d made a misstep that would lead them to the subject of Tom’s absence. Today, a stranger would have to administer her binding draught, if she passed, instead of Tom. He’d become an elephant in the room. Bea choked up every time his name was mentioned and Alice couldn’t bring herself to tell her the truth about his betrayal.

  Bea reached into the voluminous pocket of her housecoat. After a rummage, she pulled out half a dozen yellow dandelions. ‘Here. Practise while we walk,’ she said, and Alice breathed a sigh of relief. ‘There are variations but the general idea is the same. You’ll be given one of these and instructed to speed its growth into a white, fluffy head. Then you’ll have to take it from the starting point to the finish line without losing a single seed. It has to be intact at the end of the journey or you’ll fail.’

  There was a brief pause. ‘That . . . doesn’t sound too difficult.’

  Bea pulled a face. ‘The obstacles are deadly and combative. You have to meet them head-on without a single fluffy bristle floating free. The year I took my final test, two girls died in this test: one drowned in a bog and the other was crushed by rocks. The year after, three died. The last candidate got caught in brambles and was cut in half by the thorns. His family re
ported the House to the Runners.’ She shook her head. ‘The House wasn’t liable, since most families willingly accepted the risks, but it caused a stir at the time. After that, the House broadened our range of tests.’

  Alice’s pace quickened. The sooner they reached the House, the sooner she could get this over with. ‘So is there a trick?’ she asked. ‘To keep the dandelion from disintegrating?’

  Bea’s eyes sparkled briefly. ‘Of course there’s a trick. It’s all about timing its life cycle perfectly.’ She selected one of the dandelions and stroked its head. The yellow petals contracted, closing up into a green bud. The petals dried out and fell away, and when the bud opened, what was left were the white tufts of a dandelion clock.

  ‘Pause its growth so that the bud opens to reveal the fluffy head, but not all the way. Keep the bud from turning inside out; keep it semi-visible so that the tufts are kept in place,’ she said, handing the dandelion to Alice. ‘The more tightly packed together the tufts are, the less likely they’ll be blown away by an accidental flick of the wrist or a puff of air.’

  She gave Alice a grim smile. ‘If you can master the dandelion, all you’ll have to do during the test is avoid being drowned, burned, garrotted, stabbed or crushed.’

  Alice gingerly reached for a flower. ‘Oh,’ she mumbled. ‘Is that all?’

  As she observed House Mielikki from the pavement opposite, Alice allowed the flutter of nervous tension buried under her skin to grow. Her heart pounding like a piston engine, she inhaled deeply, imagining the crackle of electricity in her veins. Jude was right. Nerves were good. Adrenaline was good: an evolutionary superpower.

  ‘Bea?’ she said suddenly. ‘Do you trust him? Whitmore?’

  There was a pause. ‘Years ago, long before I was a member of the House . . . In something like the early nineties, there was a scandal around House Ilmarinen’s links with the mainland steel industry – a deal the governor had done with Thatcher. They were sanctioned for interfering and the Council banned them from taking part in the House-weighted voting system. Politically, they lost their voice in parliament. It went on for well over a year.’ She frowned. ‘It was Whitmore who lobbied for them to have the sanctions removed and their votes restored.’