Blythewood (29 page)

I sat on a low bench while my Darkling abductor performed
the homely and practical chore of tea making. The metal object was a small gas stove. He lit it and poured water (melted
snow, he told me) from a ceramic pitcher into an iron teakettle.

Darjeeling?”
“Earl Grey,” I said. “Are you a . . .
Darkling
, then?”
His lips quirked into that crooked smile again—they were

full, finely molded lips, shaped like a bow—and he whistled
softly under his breath. I’d heard the falcons in their mews
make a similar sound. “Isn’t it customary in your society to introduce oneself by name first before identifying one’s
race
?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling as if I’d been admonished by Miss Frost.
“I didn’t think . . .”
“That I had a name?” He asked, quirking one eyebrow up.
“Well, I do. It’s Raven.”
“Oh! I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Raven,” I held out my
hand to shake his, determined now not to neglect the social
niceties. He laughed so hard he spilled water from the kettle.
“Just Raven,” he corrected, taking my hand. As it had when
he first touched me, I heard the treble bell chime inside my head,
startling me so that I dropped his hand abruptly. He turned
away and busied himself cleaning up the water he’d spilled. “As
for what your kind call us—Darkling is one name for us. The
Greeks called us
aggelos
, messenger, because we traveled between the worlds and carried the souls of the dead to the next
world—the mortals to their afterworld and the fairy creatures
back to Faerie.”
“That rather sounds like what angels do . . . oh!,” I said,
clapping my hand to my mouth. “Are you telling me you’re an
angel?”
Instead of answering he lifted the kettle from the stove and
poured a stream of steaming water into a brown glazed teapot.
He swirled the water around and then dumped it into a moss
pocket. He measured out tea leaves into the pot and refilled
it with boiling water and placed it on a silver tray next to two
blue-and-white china teacups, a sugar bowl, and a creamer.
(A
creamer
? I wondered. Wherever did he get cream?)
“That’s your word for us,” he finally answered. I wasn’t sure
anymore what I was more surprised by—that I was standing
three feet away from an angel or that he had a supply of fresh
cream (from a bottle labeled “Honeybrook Farms, Rhinebeck,
N.Y.”) and a tin of chocolate biscuits. “Later we were called
nephilim or fallen angels because our wings were black instead
of the pretty gold-and-white ones in paintings. Whenever we’d
show ourselves to humans they thought we were demons. Then
your lot came along and decided all creatures from Faerie were
demons.”
“Aren’t they?” I asked. “Those ice giants tried to kills us!”
“Yes, the Jotuns are pretty vicious, but at least they’re
slow and they’re only in the woods for a few months during
the winter.”
“Well, those goblins that were chasing us certainly weren’t
very nice.”
He shuddered and his wings strained against his shirt.
“No, goblins
aren’t
nice. Sadly they developed a taste for human flesh.”
“Hell’s bells!” I swore, getting to my feet. “My friends! We
have to go back and save them!”
“Calm down,” he said. One wing stretched through the hole
in his shirt, blocking my way. The feathers only grazed my arm
but I stopped. There was something soothing in their touch,
something that reminded me of my mother’s hand when she
stroked my hair when I’d had a nightmare. “Once I scattered the
goblins they took off for their burrows. They won’t show their
rat faces for another fortnight. Your friends will be all right.”
As he talked he continued stroking my arm with his feather
tips, and then gently led me to a bench beside the tea tray he’d
set up. He sat down on the bench beside me and tucked in his
wing. His feathers rustled as he gathered them together until
the wing was tucked back between his shoulder blades and
nearly invisible. Then he poured tea, as if it were the most normal thing in the world:
fold wing, pour out tea, add sugar.
The homely motions along with the soothing touch of his
wings and the hot, sweet tea calmed me, but then I remembered
what Dame Beckwith had said about the Darklings practicing
mind control.
“Why should I trust you?” I asked. “Your kind has hunted
down my kind. I saw it in the candelabellum. You abducted Merope and destroyed the prince. You turn into crows and eat the
souls of your victims!”
“Ah, the candelabellum,” he said, his lips twisting into a
sneer. “Yes, it shows pretty pictures, but how do you know it
tells the truth? I can show you a picture show as well. Finish
your tea.”
“What?”
“Your tea,” he repeated slowly. “Finish it. It’s for—”
“Shock. Yes, so everyone keeps saying. I am not in shock.”
“I was going to say it’s for a story.
Our
side of the story.”
His long fingers wrapped around the blue-and-white teacup,
which suddenly looked tiny in his hand. He held up the cup and
revolved it in the air, his tapered fingertips grazing the figures
in the china pattern—a man and a woman in Chinese dress, a
pagoda, a boat, two birds.
“I know the story of the willow-wear pattern,” I said a little
smugly, taking the cup in my hand. “A girl who’s promised to
another runs away with her lover and her jilted fiancé tracks
them down and kills them, but they’re resurrected as birds.” I
touched my fingertips to the two blue birds, their beaks locked
in an everlasting kiss. Although I’d started out telling the story
in a bored voice just to prove I knew as much as him, my hand
trembled as I touched the birds. I was remembering my mother telling the story, and how her voice would fill with emotion
whenever she got to the part about the lovers transforming into
birds, how she would place the cup in my hands and say, “Nothing can keep true lovers apart.”
I felt Raven’s hand slip beneath mine, cradling my hands
just as my hand cradled the teacup. Suddenly my hand felt just
as fragile as the delicate china, and my body as hollow. His other
hand splayed over the cup, fingertips resting lightly on its rim.
“Look into the cup,” he said, his voice a husky purr next to
my ear. “This is our story.”
With a flick of his wrist, he twirled the cup. It began spinning in my hand like a top, only when it should have stopped, it
spun faster, the blue-and-white pictures blurring like muffled
shapes moving through a snowstorm, flakes of snow gusting
past them, so hard and fast I felt its sting on my cheeks and saw
the whirl of flakes all around me, so dizzying that I couldn’t tell
if I were watching snow rising from the spinning cup of if I was
inside
the cup watching the snow falling down . . . or if I were
the one falling.
I fell into the snowy woods. Only Raven’s hand still gripping mine kept me from tumbling to my knees into a waisthigh drift. We were standing in a snow-filled woods. A bell was
ringing—not the bass danger bell, but the sweet treble, tolling
out its forlorn tune.
Remember me, remember me.
I squinted
through the driving snow and made out the figure of a girl
slumped over a large bronze bell—a girl no older than me and
much thinner and slighter, and yet she rang steadily with hands
that were white with frostbite and raw with blood. Around her
lay her sisters, each beside a bell, too exhausted to keep ringing,
and around them . . .
I flinched as a shadow slunk behind me. Raven gripped
my hand tighter as I turned to look at what surrounded the
grove. Shadow crows filled the trees like a second snowfall
made out of ash. Long trails of soot wound around the tree
trunks—shadow wolves prowling the edges of the grove,
tightening the circle as Merope’s bell grew weaker. It was
only a matter of time before they overcame her. Even now
the shadows were creeping toward her, nosing at her flesh. A
crow dislodged from a branch and landed beside her, then another and another, each one coming closer, talons scrabbling
over snow, beaks darting toward soft flesh . . . I lurched toward
her to stop them, my legs rubbery in the deep snow, but Raven
pulled me back.
“Wait,” he whispered in my ear, his breath the only warmth
in this frozen world. His arm grasped my shoulders and he
pointed at the sky. “Look.”
Huge black wings spread over the grove, scattering the
crows. They beat the snow into a lather of white, flecked with
the torn feathers of the carrion crows and drops of blood.
The shadows . . . bleed?
It was a thought so horrible I couldn’t
even say it aloud, but in the teacup snow globe Raven heard
me and whispered back, his voice as filled with horror as my
thought.
Yes, inside every shadow creature is a bit of the animal—or
person—it once was.
The huge winged creature cleaved his way through the
bloody and smoldering crow carcasses to reach Merope. When
he reached her she had already been pecked and torn by crows,
but she was still alive. He lifted her up, blood dripping from her
torn flesh and filling the hollow impression where she had lain
through the night. But I saw her arms wrap around her winged
savior and her eyes fasten on him. I heard the treble bell ring
out, not the one on the ground,
or
the one in my head. I heard it
ringing inside
her
head.
“She knew him!” I cried. “And loved him.”
Raven clamped his hand over my mouth to hush me. Why?
Weren’t we just spectators here?
I heard Raven’s answer in my head, not in words but in images. Merope and Aderyn—I heard his name in Raven’s voice—
loved each other, but it was forbidden. A Darkling could not
love a mortal. But he could not let her die. When he rescued her
and took her as his bride the Darklings were cursed. They could
ferry souls to the mortal afterworld and Faerie, but they themselves could never cross into Faerie again. As this part of the
story fell into place, I felt Raven’s sorrow and his longing—but
whether that longing was for the world his kind had lost or for
the love that Aderyn and Merope had, I couldn’t tell. And there
was no time to ask.
Aderyn rose with Merope in his arms just as a jangle of
bells filled the clearing and the knights arrived, their horses
steaming the air, their shouts scattering the shadow creatures.
They gathered up Merope’s sisters, who cried and screamed
when they saw the bloody shape in the snow, but who were too
weak to do much else but cling to the backs of their rescuers as
they rode out of the grove, trailed by the shadows.
Come.
Before I knew what was happening, Raven had lifted me
up—as Aderyn had Merope—and we were winging through
the driving snow, following the route of the knights and the
rescued sisters. They were pursued by the shadow creatures
on land and in the air—a thick stream of crows and wolves. At
the edges of the shadow stream, though, I could make out other
creatures—lampsprites and goblins and trolls—fighting back
the shadow creatures.
“They were trying to help,” I said.
“Yes,” Raven replied, his voice mournful. “The creatures of
Faerie are no friends to the shadows. They’ve battled them for
eons. Wherever the shadows are, the fairies try to fight them.
Sometimes they lose and the shadows take over their forms.”
I saw a goblin fall under a cloak of shadow crows that
pecked holes in his tough hide. He screamed out to his companions—and in the spell of the teacup what would have normally sounded like jibbering grunts turned into words.
“Kill me!” he cried. “Slay me rather than let the tenebrae
eat my soul!”
I watched, horrified, as another goblin threw himself on his
companion and ripped out his throat with his teeth. I looked
away and heard Raven’s voice in my ear. “This is why your kind
think that the fairies are aligned with the shadows. But look,
even the Darkling who rescued Merope tried to save her sisters.”
I saw that another Darkling was flying beside us, the girl
perched on his back calling instructions into his ear and pointing to the figures on the ground. The knights had reached the
castle gate. They formed a guard around the sisters to get them
through the gate while fighting off the shadows. It was the same
scene I’d witnessed in the candelabellum, only now from my
aerial vantage point I could see what I hadn’t before—on the
edges of the battle goblins and sprites fought off the shadows
and from above Aderyn staved off the attack of the crows. If not
for Aderyn and the fairies, the knights and sisters would not
have gotten to safety, but they were not able to save the prince.
When the last of the crows landed on him I wanted to look
away. I didn’t want to see him ripped apart again. But I couldn’t
look away. I was drawn to the cluster of darkness that formed
around him as if it were a magnet that pulled me toward it, its
power growing greater as each shadow filled the hollow shape
of the struggling prince.
Watching, I grew limp in Raven’s arms. He landed beside a
rampart of the castle and braced me against the wall. I felt his
breath in my ear, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. The toll
of the bass bell was too loud in my ears. I hadn’t heard it when
I watched this same scene in the candelabellum, because that
had been a shadow play. This wasn’t. Whatever magic ruled the
teacup, it was stronger. This wasn’t a play I was watching; it was
real. The prince was being ripped to shreds in front of my eyes.
The shadow crows were burrowing beneath his skin, devouring him from the inside. I could see the crows squirming and
bulging beneath his skin. I moaned aloud at the horror of it.
And the shadow-thing turned toward me. Its face was a
mass of roiling, raw flesh, but its eyes were already sentient and
they were fastened on me. They
saw
me. His mouth opened and
smoke curdled out as he spoke.
I screamed. Raven squeezed my hand so hard I felt my
flesh rend . . . and then we were back in Raven’s nest and I was
crouched on the floor, Raven’s wings mantled over me, one arm
around my shoulder, the other cradling my closed fist. Blood
spilled from between my clenched fingers.
“It’s all right,” he was saying, his voice audible now that
the bass bell wasn’t ringing. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize your
magic was so strong you could make the scene real. I had to do
something to break the spell.” He was prying my fingers apart,
picking shards of broken china out of my shredded flesh, murmuring over and over again that he was sorry and that it was
all right until his words blurred into a cooing like the sound
pigeons made on the windowsill in the city. Dimly I felt him
cleaning and wrapping my hand and then he was wrapping me
in a blanket because I couldn’t stop shivering and then he was
laying me down on the pallet, which was surprisingly soft, like
a feather bed, and he was covering me with his wings because I