The Harp and the Ravenvine

by Ted Sanders

  DEDICATION

  For Dad,

  for teaching me how to have adventures

  EPIGRAPH

  “Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though.

  That’s the problem.”

  — A. A. MILNE, WINNIE-THE-POOH

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Leaving Home APRIL

  NINE DAYS

  WILD NOW

  REVELATIONS

  TRAVELING COMPANIONS

  DETOUR

  The Sundered Bloom BRIAN’S BRAIN

  THE DAKTAN

  PRAIRIE LAKE STATION

  THE HEDGE WITCH

  HINTS AND PROMISES

  SENT

  Little Bo Peep ADRIFT

  CLOSER

  FALLING

  THE CHAPERONE

  WHAT BELONGS

  HOPE FOR NO REGRET

  WITNESS

  CONTACT

  THEN INTO NOW

  The Departed REUNION

  THE NEW RECRUIT

  IN THE LIGHT OF TUNRADEN

  BEYOND THE RAINBOW

  MOTHERING

  BETWEEN FRIENDS

  FEAR IS THE STONE

  ORPHANS’ OATH

  A NEW JOURNEY

  BATTLEFIELD

  WHAT LIES AHEAD

  HOW LONG NOTHING LASTS

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  Leaving Home

  CHAPTER ONE

  April

  APRIL WOKE IN DARKNESS TO THE SOUND OF BARON GROWLING. Not that she could hear the dog, exactly. He was far out in the backyard at the edge of the woods. It was impossible to hear anything outside, not with the window closed and Uncle Harrison’s ancient air conditioner wheeze-rattling from the next room over. No, it wasn’t the sound of growling that woke April from her troubled sleep. It was the . . . what? April didn’t quite have the word for the way the dog’s warning bloomed inside her mind.

  She wasn’t sure there was a word.

  She lay in her bed and focused on Baron’s anger, vibrating like a wasp’s nest in her head, until she swore she could almost feel a rumble in her throat and chest. It made her heart pound. Baron was a farm dog, sturdy and wise, not the type of dog to get riled up in the middle of the night without reason. For a moment April was sure the stranger she’d seen yesterday had returned, the woman with fiery red hair, watching the house from the trees. But no—yesterday, Baron had barely bothered to notice the red-haired stranger before she slipped away. Whatever he’d caught wind of tonight was something . . . different.

  April waited for the dog to settle down. Instead his growling grew deeper. April’s arms and legs began to tingle, aching to act. She kicked the blankets back and sat up, reaching for her temple. She couldn’t hear Baron growling, no, but she didn’t have to hear.

  She just knew.

  She knew because of this: the mysterious object she’d found at the flea market two weeks before. Flat, and about the size of her open hand, it was a delicately crafted golden vine, curling and beautiful, with tiny gold and silver leaves. April wore it wrapped around the back of her left ear, where it hugged her tight, as if made for her. It lay snug against the side of her head, the only jewelry she had ever even tried to wear. But of course the vine was more than mere jewelry. Much more. April wasn’t willing to say that the vine was magic—she didn’t believe in magic, and felt only a little bit bad about it. But there was no denying that what the vine did was . . . phenomenal. Yes, that was a good word. Phenomenal.

  Downstairs, the ancient grandfather clock in the hallway began to chime. It was three in the morning. After it fell silent, she pressed the vine against her temple, listening hard. Through the vine, a part of Baron’s mind was alive inside her own. He was a brave dog, a good dog, protecting the farmhouse, protecting April and her older brother, Derek, and fat Uncle Harrison. Just as she’d known that Baron hadn’t felt threatened by yesterday’s red-haired stranger, April knew how badly he yearned to bark at whatever was out there now; her own throat itched with the urge. Even more, though, she knew that a terrible stench drifted out from the midnight woods, digging deep into Baron’s sensitive nose, stinging and foreign and troubling.

  April couldn’t actually smell this stink. Nonetheless, a huge part of Baron’s brain—and therefore April’s as well—roiled with disgust. Disgust and anger and fear. Underneath all his bravery, Baron was afraid of this smell. And therefore April was too.

  She lay there, worrying but trying not to fret. April always tried to stay calm on the outside, no matter what was going on inside. If only the vine was working as well as it was supposed to, she thought. If it were, maybe then she could stay here and discover what had Baron so spooked. Maybe she could know everything Baron knew—hear what he could hear, smell what he could smell, discover the truth about the invader in the woods—if only the vine were whole.

  But the vine wasn’t whole. It was broken.

  She ran her thumb across the broken stem of the vine, a single rough nub that hung down just in front of her ear. The vine had been like this when she found it. A piece had been amputated, a nauseating thought. She preferred to believe that the missing piece was out there somewhere in the world—she had to believe—but without it, the vine was incomplete. She was incomplete. She didn’t know how she knew this, but she knew this with every fiber of her being. Without the missing piece, she couldn’t hear as clearly as she was supposed to, even when she concentrated her very hardest. And sometimes, when she pushed too hard . . .

  April shoved the thought down. It wasn’t good to dwell on things you couldn’t do anything about. Instead, she would do something about Baron. She stood and went to the window, rocking the crooked sash open gingerly. Though it was the middle of June, a startling and unsummerish slap of cool air pushed in, toppling the delicate pyramid of cicada shells on her nightstand. The brittle amber husks skittered across the hardwood floor. Outside, April could now hear Baron’s agitated whine for real. He gave a round little half bark. In her head, his unease rose and fell with the sound of his voice.

  She climbed out onto the roof below, the gritty shingles digging into her bare knees. She clambered to her feet, her toes gripping the steep slope with the ease of long practice. She squeezed past Uncle Harrison’s old air conditioner, careful not to bump against the window. Her dim shadow spilled across the roof in front of her, drawn by the hazy half-moon behind. The black bodies of the trees rose all around the yard, breathing softly in the wind. The air prickled her arms. There was a storm coming—she could feel it not only in her own bones, but in Baron’s as well.

  It was because of Baron that she’d learned what the vine could do. She’d come home with the vine that first day, not knowing what it was or what it did, but bursting with an exhilarated confidence she’d never felt before. The vine was hers and no one else’s, a secret garden of wonders to which she herself was the only key. She’d sat on the back porch with Baron by her side, and after an hour of fussing, she had experimentally snugged the vine around her left ear. It fit perfectly. A few curling branches jutted out below her ear, while over the top a longer meandering arm stretched delicately toward her temple, splitting and looping like the ivy that grew across the garage.

  She’d felt warmth against her skin, and a comforting pressure, and then . . . it was almost impossible to describe. An entirely separate consciousness had opened up miraculously inside her own, a sea of emotion that wasn’t hers—comfort, affection, contentment. All of it both totally foreign and completely familiar. She’d forgotten to
breathe, forgotten even to see. “Who are you?” she’d said aloud, and as soon as she spoke, the new mind within her mind trembled attentively, almost as if it had heard her.

  At the same instant, Baron had lifted his head and perked his ears at the sound of her voice. April met his gaze, and his tail began to thump, and a slow jolt of simple joy flooded her, coming not from within but without. She took the vine off, just to see, and everything went gray and blank. All that bright joy disappeared. When she slipped the vine back on, it came flooding back.

  That was when she knew. She was reading Baron’s mind—or no, it was more like the vine allowed Baron’s mind to overlap her own, like she was both herself and the dog at the same time. She could feel his love for her, really feel it, as big and as simple and as pure as love could be, and because Baron loved her, in the strangest way it was like loving herself too, and . . .

  Suffice it to say that there had been crying. Tears of astonished joy—quite a few, actually. And April firmly believed there was no shame in that.

  Afterward, she’d learned that the vine worked on every animal, not just Baron. Or to be more specific, it worked on every nonhuman animal—the vine didn’t work on people, thank goodness. April much preferred the company of animals to the company of humans anyway. She always spent her summers wandering the woods and meadows around the house, climbing trees and wading Boone Creek and quietly watching animals live their lives.

  And now with the vine, those activities were magnificently transformed. In the last two weeks she’d opened herself to the minds of nesting robins and foraging raccoons and thirsty leeches and once, at Doc Durbin’s vet clinic just through the woods, a wounded badger. Deer, toads, squirrels, snakes, red-tailed hawks—almost every animal one could hope to find here in northern Illinois. And in each encounter, a part of each animal’s consciousness—fear, excitement, boredom, pain, hunger—became a temporary part of her own.

  It was a miracle made just for her, she sometimes felt, and the vine was without question her most prized possession. More than a possession, actually. She was so connected to it that on the rare occasions when she took it off, usually just to shower, she could feel the vine pulling at her, an ever-present tug of longing and belonging. The vine was not just hers, but her.

  Yet because of the missing piece, that deep burn of ownership came with a constant, ragged ache. She was defective. She was incomplete. Wondrous as it was, using the broken vine was like trying to read a book that was barely cracked open. With each animal she listened to, she knew there was a deeper immersion to be had, a fuller story. It was as if she could hear a far-off hum but couldn’t quite make it out. Twice she’d pushed hard to get that fuller story—once with Baron, once with the wounded badger—and things had gone . . . badly. But she couldn’t worry about that now. Right now, she had to keep herself within the limits of the vine as it was, not as she wished it to be. April rubbed the broken nub one last time and kept moving.

  She stepped over the sticky line of tar at the ridge where the roof bent around the back of the house. Here, outside Derek’s room, the breeze hit her hard, shrinking her skin across her bones and throwing her long hair across her face.

  Down in the yard, Baron stood stiff-legged, the yellow fur on his broad shoulders bristling, his head pointed alertly toward the woods out back. He shimmied and growled, then froze again, ears pricked. April didn’t smell anything on the air, but she knew Baron still did. Foul. Bitter. Burning.

  April couldn’t see anything in the jagged jumble of moonlit shadows. She couldn’t sense anything with the vine, either, aside from buzzing insects and the slumbering family of sparrows that lived in a nest beneath the gutters. That meant one of two things: either the mysterious intruder was beyond the range of the vine, or it wasn’t an animal. She called softly to the dog. “Baron! What is it?”

  That familiar wave of affection pulsed through the vine at the sound of her voice. Baron whined and fidgeted, giving her a half glance and two quick tail wags.

  An instant later, the air was split by the sharp crack of a stick breaking underfoot, somewhere out among the trees.

  Baron charged toward the noise, stopping at the edge of the lawn. He began to bark ferociously. Panic and rage exploded in April’s chest. She steeled herself against her own dread—and Baron’s fury—and inched closer to the edge of the roof, trying to spot movement between the towering slender shadows of the trees.

  And then, suddenly and unmistakably, one of those shadows walked.

  A towering silhouette, impossibly tall and impossibly thin, ghosting swiftly through the trees. Ten feet tall or more, arms the size of saplings, strides long enough to cross Boone Creek in a single step.

  Gasping, April lurched back. She toppled over, banging her head against the wall beside Derek’s half-open window. Baron continued to bark and charge as the shadow slid away. What was it? Before April could stop herself, she let the outside world fade and flung herself open to the vine, needing to know what Baron knew. The dog’s rage, his fear, his disgust flooded through her. The vine quivered with intensity, resisting her, the broken stem aching like a snapped bone. She reached for more, urging the dog’s mind to spread through her own.

  And then the vine started to scream. A silent scream that filled her head. “No, not now,” April whispered as everything went white and loud and hot, blinding and deafening and burning. The very cells in her brain seemed to be on fire, the pain unbearable, but she held on. Baron’s barks sounded like the thunder of the gods, shaking her ribs. Each of the stars overhead glowed as bright as the sun. And above all she smelled something stinging and bitter and rotten—the foul stench Baron had been smelling. April clung to it, trying to make sense of it, but the vine’s screaming whiteness grew and grew, stabbing at the backs of her eyes until at last she couldn’t take it anymore. She tore the vine from her head and collapsed back against the house again, gasping.

  Swiftly, her senses came back to her. Baron was still barking. The stars were distant and tiny again. She thought she could still smell that foul smell, faint but unmistakable—like rotten eggs. The shadow in the woods was gone.

  Meanwhile her head pounded, and in her hand the vine, with its ever-broken stem, seemed to shudder with pain, quivering and electric. “I’m sorry,” she told it. “I’m sorry.”

  From the window beside her, a trapezoid of light fell across the roof. A moment later, Derek heaved the window open with a single impatient thrust and stuck his head through, curtains billowing out and around his sleepy, stubbled face.

  “First Baron!” he bellowed, using the dog’s full name. “Shut up!”

  The dog quieted at once. “I’m sleeping,” Derek called out, as though he needed to explain himself. “People are sleeping.” He ran a hand through his rumpled brown hair. He looked into the sky skeptically for a moment, still not noticing April, and then pulled his head back in. April tried to calm her pounding heart, to ease the knife of pain in her head. She slipped the vine back around her ear, hiding it under her hair. Before Derek could close the window, April swung around to face him, still so breathless she could hardly speak.

  Derek leapt back, a choked cry popping out of him—“Jah!” He fell against his dresser. “Pill, what are you doing out there?”

  “Sorry,” she said, puffing hard. “Do you smell that?”

  “You scared me to death.” Derek held out a strong hand. “What are you doing out there? Come on—inside.” April glanced back into the trees one last time. Whatever they’d seen was gone now. The stench still lingered in Baron’s nose, but his alarm was dwindling, replaced by a rising swell of vigilant pride.

  April took Derek’s hand, not needing it but not wanting to seem stubborn. “You seriously didn’t smell that?” she said as she climbed inside. “It was like . . . acid. Terrible.” Derek slid the window closed, and her nose began to fill with the odors permeating his room, ordinary eighteen-year-old-boy smells—sweaty sheets, manky clothes, empty soda cans, musky products.<
br />
  “Is that what Baron was barking at?” Derek asked. “A stink?”

  “There was something out in the woods.”

  “Something,” Derek said.

  “Something crazy tall. But like a human.”

  Derek glanced sharply at the window. His chest seemed to swell. “Someone’s out there?”

  “I didn’t say someone.”

  “Right,” he said slowly. He nodded at her, feigning seriousness. “Crazy tall, but like a human. Plus a bad smell. Maybe it’s Bigfoot.”

  He was teasing her. As always, she waited a beat, letting her irritation drift away so that it wouldn’t show. Derek wasn’t going to take her seriously. And why should he? She hardly knew what to think herself. Almost automatically, she slipped into the easy rhythm of their usual banter. “I don’t believe in Bigfoot,” she said.

  Derek smiled and scratched the scraggly beard he’d been trying to grow out. “Right, I know. But what if Bigfoot believes in you?”

  “In that case, I appreciate his imaginary support.” April replayed the vision of the shadow she’d seen, reminding herself how firmly she did not believe in Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster, or any ridiculous creatures like that. The problem was, she could not think of anything else she did believe in that would explain what she and Baron had seen, and smelled. Not an animal. Not a man.

  Suddenly she remembered the woman with the red hair. She couldn’t possibly have anything to do with this, could she? Surely not, and yet there was something in the way the woman had looked at April from across the yard. Not threatening, exactly, but . . . fierce. Penetrating.

  April shivered, and caught sight of herself in Derek’s bureau mirror. To her surprise, she didn’t look frightened at all. She looked . . . alive. Not pretty, exactly, despite her thick auburn hair. Her face and her body were stringy and plain. Her nose was slightly crooked, a family trait. Her hair covered the vine, keeping it hidden, but the golden tip of it glinted at her temple, and her hazel eyes were bright and brave. For a moment, watching those eyes, she almost forgot she was looking at herself.