Hawthorn (33 page)

We came out into the Blythewood tower, the bells ringing so hard the walls were shaking, the landscape shrouded in fog. Over the tolling of the bells of Blythewood I heard, like an echo, the bells of Bouillon and one other bell—the smallest treble bell chiming faintly as though it were underwater. It was Merope's bell, the one that had fallen into the Hudson River when the bells were brought over from Scotland. I could feel its chime spreading out in circles, like rings in a pond, spreading over Blythewood and beyond—across the ocean to Bouillon.

The fog cleared and we were standing on top of the tower at Bouillon. The air was thick with smoke and the reek of gunpowder and blood and the metallic tang of iron. A mortar shell
whizzed by and struck the castle walls. Stones tumbled to the ground leaving a gaping hole, which the ghost soldiers poured through. Mr. Bellows charged forward, sword in hand, Sam Greenfeder by his side. Raven and Marlin led a battalion of Darklings into the fray. Bottom blew his bugle to muster the Hawthorn Fusiliers. Miss Sharp and Miss Corey shot burning arrows into the advancing lines of shadow soldiers.

All our friends were fighting valiantly, but the ghost soldiers kept coming. There was an inexhaustible supply, and they kept coming with the relentless precision of a machine.

“They
are
a machine,” I said aloud. “Van Drood forged the guns with the soldiers' blood and bound them together into one infernal killing machine. If I can destroy the guns—”

“But we destroyed them before,” Nathan asked, staring at the destruction around us. “And it didn't keep the soldiers from coming back.”

“Because we didn't break the bond between the guns and the soldiers. Only my bells can do that.”

I closed my eyes and tuned in the sound of the bells inside me. I could still hear the subaqueous echo of Merope's bell tolling beneath the Hudson River, spreading vibrations out through the water, connecting the bells of Blythewood to the bells of Bouillon. I let myself fill with all the bells until I was vibrating to their tones—to the deep bass clanging fear and the sweet treble chiming love, and to everything in between—despair, joy, envy, hope.

I felt it all. I felt how it was all connected, the bad to the good. And deep at the base of my spine, I felt the darkness uncurling, coming to life . . .

I opened my eyes. The tower was shaking, but not with the blows of the guns.
I
was making it shake. I had the power of all the bells within me.

Nathan and Helen were staring at me.

“Please don't explode,” Helen said. She was shivering in her chemise, the veil and netted dress fallen away. Her face and arms still carried the marks of the shadow net. I wondered if she was completely free of van Drood's power, but then Manon burst through the tower door and threw the white lace veil she had been making over Helen's head and shoulders. Instantly the marks faded from Helen's skin and she stopped shivering. She cast off the last shreds of van Drood's veil.

I'd have to ask Manon someday what magic she wove into the lace to free Helen from van Drood's power, but right then I knew I had better move before I blew us all up.

I spread my wings and flew from the tower, over the courtyard where my friends were losing the battle to the ghost soldiers, over the battlefield where the giant, bloody and stumbling, swung his club at mortar shells. I saw lutins struggling to stem the tide of the dead and lumignon darting in and out between the ranks of the Hawthorn Fusiliers, protecting them from the gunfire. I saw Collie kneeling beside an injured Jinks screaming for help and Gus swooping down to save Sirena from the point of a bayonet.

“Retreat!” I screamed. “Fall back to the castle!”

In the midst of it all I saw van Drood, riding the crest of the ghost soldiers, like a swollen tick on a dog's back. I pictured the young schoolmaster bent over his toy soldiers and the way he'd blushed when the girls laughed at him, and pity mixed with all
the other emotions clanging away inside of me. Pity was a deep sonorous bell that threatened to bring me to the ground, but then it mixed with anger, which stoked the fire in my wings.

“So you were hurt!” I cried out. “Millions are hurt every day and they don't lash out. You can't destroy the whole world to keep from feeling! You can't turn us all into your toy soldiers!”

As I spoke I felt the vibrations of the bells inside me spreading outward, entering the only iron vessels near me—the guns. They were vibrating with my fury, the mortar shells clattering inside them like loose teeth. The ghost soldiers, too, were shaking. They were tied by blood to the guns and to van Drood's mind. For a moment I was inside his mind. I saw him sitting at his desk, lining up his toy soldiers in a row—

—and then it all exploded. The great iron guns shattered into a million pieces, spraying steel shards and clods of earth into the sky. I was pushed up and back, hurtling backward over the castle wall. My head was full of the screams of the ghost soldiers as their bond to van Drood was broken. Then I hit the tower wall and the screaming stopped. As I slid down the stones to the pavement below I heard only a single bell tolling. A death knell for me, I suspected.

Raven caught me before I hit the flagstones. I saw his face over me, his lips moving, but I couldn't hear his voice. Instead I heard van Drood's voice inside my head.

A brave gesture, my dear, but fruitless. There are so many more shadows where I'm going.

I pushed Raven aside and struggled to my feet. Van Drood was standing in the courtyard beside the well. His face was covered in blood and ash, his hair burnt off by the explosion,
one arm flapping limp and disjointed from his shoulder. He shouldn't have been alive—and I'm not sure he was. He'd drunk so long from the shadows that his limbs were held together by hatred and malice. When he grinned at me part of his jaw flapped open, revealing white bone. He jerked one leg over the rim of the well and, his cape flapping like the wings of a bat, plunged feet first down the chute.

He was heading for the last vessel.

Before Raven could stop me I leapt across the courtyard and followed him down into the darkness.

I HAD TO
tuck my wings in close to my sides in the narrow well so they wouldn't slow my descent. I plummeted down and down until I wondered if we were journeying to the center of the earth like in Mr. Verne's novel. Aesinor had said that the vessel was buried beneath the castle, but I hadn't imagined it was so deep—and I didn't know what I would find at the end of the well. Another maze like the one at Hawthorn? I didn't have a golden thread or a knight to show me the way—but neither did van Drood. Or was the well a trick? Was it a part of Faerie where I'd be falling forever?

Then I hit water with an impact like hitting a brick wall. The cold enveloped me and wiped out every feeling but the need to breathe. But which way was up? Was there a way out? Or was this a trap to drown anyone trying to reach the vessel?

I saw something glimmering below me and dove toward it. I swam through a tunnel and came out in a cavern, gasping for breath and so cold I could barely drag myself out of the water. When I managed that I could only lie on my back, panting, gazing up at what looked like the ceiling of a great cathedral spun from glass and lace and a million colored lights. The great arching vault rested on intricately carved pillars that glimmered
like wet sand. The ceiling was paved in tiny bits of stained glass—a mosaic that formed a shifting landscape of mountains and rivers, sunsets and clouds, and figures moving across fields of grass and tundras of ice. The figures built fires and stone circles and castles and churches. The whole history of the human race seemed to be passing across the ceiling. Maybe I was dying and this was my last glimpse of the world.

“They're dreaming.”

The voice roused me from the panorama. I turned my head and saw a man crouched a few feet away, kneeling beside a glowing pool of light. It took me a second to recognize van Drood, he was so transformed. The water had washed away the blood and ash, but more than that, his expression was one I'd never seen on his face. It was wonder.

I rolled over and since I couldn't stand—I had broken something in the fall—crawled to him, dragging my limp wings in the sand. The pool was surrounded by a stone rim. I braced myself on it and pulled myself up into a sitting position to look in.

It wasn't a pool. It was a round sheet of opaque glass beneath which swam dark shapes. It reminded me of the time I had skated on the frozen Hudson and seen fish swimming beneath the ice—and then later, shadows.

“This is the vessel,” I said. “Those are shadows. But they're—”

“Beautiful,” van Drood said. “The fairies locked them away because they made humans too powerful.”

“They locked them away because mankind was destroying itself.” I looked up at the ceiling and saw that the pictures were projected from the shimmering glass surface like images from
a magic lantern. They were battling each other now. Flames flickered on the walls, bursts of blood dripped down the columns.

“Because they hadn't found a master yet. I have found a way to harness the shadows, to tie them into a machine that works for the greater good.”

“
Good?
You call this war you've raised
good
?”

He clucked his tongue and shook his head like a schoolmaster disappointed with his favorite student. “The war was a necessary evil to gain my objective—to free the last of the shadows so that I could have complete control. Once the shadows have all been harnessed into my machines they will be harmless. The world will be a peaceful place.”

“A dead place,” I countered. “I've seen your world. You would destroy all free will, all beauty—”

“Not at all! Look at this.” He held up his hands to the images playing over the walls and ceiling. “There is no beauty without darkness. You, of all people, know that, Avaline.”

I began to object but then I felt that dark thing stirring at the base of my spine.

“Yes, there's darkness in you, born from the Darkling curse but nurtured by all you've seen in this world. Don't deny it any longer. It's what makes you strong.”

I tried to tell myself that he was wrong, but the thing coiling around my spine told me differently. I could feel it responding to the pictures on the walls, to the closeness of all those shadows clustered beneath the glass. I put my hand on the glass and the shapes swarmed to it like sharks smelling blood. They sensed me, sensed the darkness in me that was rising up.

Van Drood was right. The darkness may have come from my Darkling heritage but it was nurtured on the streets of New York, where I saw children starve and horses beaten to death, and in the dark, unheated tenement rooms where my mother and I went to bed hungry and even the
hope
that things could ever be different grew thin and wasted in the frigid air. It was fed at the back doors of Fifth Avenue mansions where I stood in the cold waiting for my mother to deliver the hats she made for rich, idle women, shut out from even the hope of a better life.

The darkness wrapped itself around my spine, healing the bones I'd broken in the fall, and got me to my feet. Van Drood rose with me.

“Yes!” he cried. “I saw it in you, Avaline, as you were growing up. I saw the way you looked at those rich women. Why should they have it easy while your mother worked her fingers to the bone? I saw how you looked at the factory owner's daughters that day at the Triangle.”

I gasped at the memory. It seemed like a hundred years ago that I'd looked up from my sewing to see Mr. Blanck's plump well-fed daughters in their pretty dresses and smart hats. Tillie had wanted me to copy their hats for her, and I'd snapped that a knock-off hat wouldn't make her look like those girls. I could feel the jealousy and spite crawling up my spine, making my skin tingle. Whenever I'd felt like this before, I'd tamped down the feeling, afraid that once I let it loose I'd never be able to stop it, that my anger would consume me—

My wings snapped open and caught fire, the reflection of their flames lighting up the cathedral, the shadows dancing gleefully against the flaming backdrop. Darkest of all rose the
shadow of a winged creature—a monster. This is what I'd always been afraid of: that if I gave free rein to my anger it would turn me into a monster.

I just hadn't realized how good it would feel.

“I always knew you had the darkness in you, more even than my son. And look how powerful you are—not just a Darkling but a phoenix! It was your kind that carried the vessels and sealed them, and only your kind can open the vessel. Do it now, Ava. Open the vessel. The fire from your wings can melt the glass.”

I stared at him. “Only a phoenix . . . But that would mean . . . ?”

Van Drood smiled. With his loose jawbone and burnt skin it was a gruesome sight. “That the first two vessels were opened by phoenixes. Your kind has always betrayed the Darklings. It's because the darkness in you
burns
. It longs to be reunited with its kind.”

“No!” But I could feel the snake at the base of my spine uncurling, spreading its wings. It wasn't a snake—it was a fire-breathing dragon and it wanted
out
.

Van Drood's smile widened to reveal a bottomless smoking pit. “And it's not just your predecessors who have betrayed your kind. You've already done it once in that future you traveled to. The only way the shadows could have gotten out of the third vessel was if
you
let them out. Look . . .”

The figures on the walls were acting out a play. The phoenix and the man in the cape, whose shadow looked like a giant crow, were both kneeling over the mouth of the vessel. The phoenix was fanning the flames around them, melting the glass cover, releasing the shadows—fat tadpole-shaped creatures with
gaping fanged mouths that latched onto people and sucked the life out of them.
Sucked the hope out of them
. These were the hope-eaters that Aelfweard had told me about.

“But how could that be?” I cried.

“We're standing outside time,” van Drood explained patiently. “This moment exists in all time. What you did before is what you'll do again—and again. It's what you'll always do. Can't you hear them calling to you?”

I did. I didn't need Darkling ears to listen. The shadows were calling from beneath the glass.
With us you will never be weak again, you'll never be cold or hungry. No one will laugh at you or hurt you.
I knelt beside the mouth of the vessel, beside van Drood, just as my shadow had—as it
would
? as it
always did
?—and pressed my hand to the glass. The shadows swarmed to my touch. I could feel the glass growing warm, melting in the flame from my wings. Why else did I have wings of flame if not to do this?

Out of the shards of the broken vessel a new light will shine.

It was Miss Corey's voice I heard, reading from
A Darkness of Angels.

A phoenix born of Darkling and human, to drive the shadows away.

Then I heard Wren's voice.

When a phoenix is fledged our curse will end.

Could it be that I was supposed to break the vessel?

Yes
, sang the shadows.

But there had been phoenixes before and the curse wasn't ended. . . .

You are different
, sang the shadows.
You are the one
.

I stared at van Drood. His eyes shone with the reflection of my burning wings. Suddenly I saw the flames leaping across the cutting tables at the Triangle factory. I saw girls shrieking as their dresses caught on fire. I saw Tillie Kupermann reaching for me on the roof and plunging to her death. That morning she had said to me that she knew I was on the side of the angels.

And then I felt Raven's arms around me when he'd caught me and I heard Raven's voice, like a bell tolling in my head—
only a chime child can destroy a shadow master.

The bell tolled sweet and clear—the treble bell I heard for love. A long jagged crack fissured through the glass. Van Drood, his face rapt, leaned forward. I put my hand on his back—just as I'd seen him put his hand on Tillie Kupermann's back on the roof of the Triangle—and pushed him through the widening crack. Taken unawares he fell, but at the last moment he grabbed my arm and pulled me with him. I toppled forward, one hand clutching the rim, our bodies blocking the crack, the shadows clambering around us, calling to me. Their voices were surprisingly sweet. It would be so easy to let go—

But then I heard other voices—Raven and Helen, Nathan and Daisy—calling for me. They had climbed down the well, braving this terrible place to find me. I fanned my wings behind me and twisted out of van Drood's grip. I saw his eyes widen with surprise—and then he was falling. I saw the shadows swarming over him, devouring him, as carrion crows pick clean a carcass on the side of the road. Then I pulled back and fanned my wings over the glass, sweeping the melted glass over the crack until it was filled. I doused the fire in my wings by
thinking of the icy North Atlantic and frigid mornings waking up in unheated tenements, and then fanned that coldness over the glass until the seal had set. The shadows batted against the glass, but like moths against a window their cries were muffled, drowned out by friends calling for me.

I turned away from the shadows and called back to my friends. “Here,” I cried. “I'm here.”